


Truth Speaker (eresh-vaca)

by tripletmoons



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Tatooine Slave Culture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-21
Updated: 2018-03-21
Packaged: 2019-04-06 05:28:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,350
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14049924
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tripletmoons/pseuds/tripletmoons
Summary: When Shmi first notices the swell of her stomach, round and pale like a triplet moon, she thinks: desert mirage, hallucination. She has never lain with a man, not once in her life. Sure, some bleedings have passed without blood but this is not uncommon for a slave in Mos Espa. She cannot be pregnant. Sleep deprived, perhaps, or the unfortunate host of parasitic worms.





	Truth Speaker (eresh-vaca)

When Shmi first notices the swell of her stomach, round and pale like a triplet moon, she thinks: _desert mirage, hallucination._ She has never lain with a man, not once in her life. Sure, some bleedings have passed without blood but this is not uncommon for a slave in Mos Espa. She cannot be pregnant. Sleep deprived, perhaps, or the unfortunate host of parasitic worms.

When she next has some hours to herself, she walks to the home of the nearest _baeshaza_. Emet is an old, wind-weathered medical-woman that knows the ailments of a desert slave better than anyone. Shmi has visited her several times over the years, mostly on the business of illness but sometimes for company. She trusts Emet’s sunbaked hands as much as Emet trusts Shmi to speak truth.

After examining her, Emet fixes Shmi with a gimlet stare that drops her stomach to her feet. “Why have you come to me with this, _eresh-vaca?_ I cannot abort the fetus with what I have here: you waited too long. You should’ve come right after you were touched. You know this.”

Shmi cannot respond. She feels like she is frozen, stuck between moments like the desert at sunset. “ _baeshaza,_ she eventually says, prying the words from her throat, “I am untouched. _ahmi anahita.”_

Shmi has never seen Emet rattled, not once. Not when Shmi warned her of the illness that would sweep the slave quarters or foretold miscarriages down to the hour. Emet had always been stone steady, yet when the _baeshaza_ lays a hand on her stomach, Shmi could feel it shaking. “Untouched?”

"Yes. This- this is impossible.” But even as she says it, Shmi knows down to the bones that it isn’t. She’s been lying to herself for days, for weeks. Parasitic worms, indeed.

“Not impossible.” Emet says, something like awe in her voice. “You know the workings of _bakha barethri_ as well as anyone. Better than most, _eresh-vaca_.”

Shmi does. She knows the Goddess Mother like she knows the feeling of sand beneath her feet, like she knows the sound of desert wind and the feel of the sun. She knows _bakha barethri_ like she knows her own name, the feel of a whip, the stomach-clench of hunger.

“I am an _anahita barethri.”_ She says and it is truth. She’s been an untouched mother for weeks now.

“Shmi.” The medic-woman says, drawing her attention back to the moment at hand. Emet’s eyes are swimming with raw emotion; Shmi is too frazzled to keep herself from feeling Emet’s _hopegiddinessawe_ at the back of her head. She want’s to flinch from it but doesn’t. “I will help you with this birth. Come to me whenever you can and I will keep an eye on the health of your child. I would be honored for _my_ hands to be the ones that welcome them to this world. You would know better than I when to expect the birth, but I suspect you have twenty-two weeks to prepare.”

“Yes, _baeshaza.”_ Shmi says, getting waveringly to her feet.

She cannot remember if Emet says anything else after that. She walks out of the infirmary on autopilot. Mos Espa feels huge around her, heavy with _indifferencesuffering_ that sickens her stomach. Her feet take her away, towards the relative stillness of desert and the call of _bakha barethri_ she forever hears on the winds. Above her the sky turns golden and then dark, the pale faces of triple moons peeking at her from over distant sand dunes. She keeps walking until something says: _stop_.

She stops and gets onto her knees, drawing her japor totems from her pockets. They are familiar under her fingers, carved with depictions of _bakha barethri_ and _azhish_ and tales of _ash-vareca_. She focuses on them: the ivory in her hands, the ridges and notches of each symbol. She can feel the life in the desert, the snakes in the sands and the dragons in the dunes. Here, Mos Espa is a distant hurt.

Then, with newfound clarity, she turns her mind out to in.

She thinks of the child in her womb, turning the idea of motherhood over in her mind. She can feel the child and they are warm like an ember, like a mouthful of baked bread, like the ghost of her own mother’s hand in her hair. She has never thought of motherhood as something that would happen to her before. For weeks now, consciously or unconsciously, she’s been avoiding thinking of it. Which, in retrospect, was foolish of her. A slave lying to their master is one thing, but lying to themselves?

Now that she is facing the truth of this child, of her child, she finds herself liking the idea it: a child borne from _bakha barethri_ and the desert _,_ someone she can hold and love and teach. Something hers. Family.

_Yes_ , the desert whispers, and again she feels that phantom sensation of a mother’s hand.

She likes the idea of a child, but to be a slave and a mother is a dual-sided blade. She will have a child, but any child borne of her will be born a slave. They will have a tracker-detonator beneath their skin that matches hers. They will be treated like property, as she is. She can see an image, clear as day: her child snatched away from her very breast, taken away Unnamed. Gardulla wouldn’t let Shmi keep a child, would have them sold before they took their first breath. The mere idea of it fills her with creeping dread and quick-lit anger.

But, what can she do? She is going to have a child; that much is certain. It is a thirst now, a feeling like the persistent longing for water, for freedom. So, she is going to have a child and her child will be a slave. But taken from her?

_No._ She thinks, and it is the truth.

\----------

Shmi has been an _eresh-vaca_ since she was very young. When she was a child she was limited to only knowing small truths: when to stay quiet, the feeling of a worse-than-bad-master, the safest path through a market-day crowd. Now that Shmi is twenty-five, she has the capacity to know more.

She focuses in on _my son will not be taken from me_ and not only can she feel the truth in it, but also how to make it true. Paradoxical, but that is familiar to her. Slavery is outlawed in the republic but Shmi can be bought for 3,000 republic credits. Slaves are familiar with paradoxes.

With a prayer to _bakha barethri,_ Shmi sets herself up to be sold.

She does this by going to the market and standing, her cloak folded over her arm. She waits and waits until the wind stills, hair on her arms rising, and she is inevitably plowed into by a droid.

The droid’s master is a Trodarian that feels of slick greed and old injury. He sees her, takes in the visible signs of slavery, her tattered clothing and carefully displayed baby-bump, and begins shouting. “Watch where you are going, you useless slave-shit! Stay the kriffing hells out of the pathways! You broke my droid!”

Shmi did not break his droid but bows anyway. “I am so sorry, sir. I will fix the droid for you. Please don’t tell my master!”

The Trodarian gives her another once over, this time with more interest, and nods as his eyes alight on the workers belt at her hip, one of the few things she has left from her childhood. “If you break him further, girl-.” He leaves the threat unfinished.

Shmi isn’t threated. She is calm, still like undisturbed water. Her actions are guided and steady.

She bows again, reaches into her belt, and gets to work. Shmi already knows why the droid is walking weird: crossed wires in the leg and a displaced chip. She fixes them fast, but not too fast. She doesn’t want to seem too capable. The Trodarian’s eyes burn into her neck as she works.

“Girl,” he says as she closes the droid up, “are you a mechanic?”

“No, sir. I am a waitress that works for an establishment run by Gardulla the hutt.”

“A waitress.” He murmurs, his greedy-slick presence spiking.

Shmi nods, grabbing her cloak from the ground and swinging it on, obscuring her shape in the drab fabric. If Gardulla knew she was pregnant, she’d hike up Shmi’s asking price, which wouldn’t do. The Trodarian wouldn’t pay more than 3,000 for her, after all.

“I must go to work now.” She says. “I am sorry for my clumsiness, sir.”

When she ends her day, after working twelve hours on her feet with a tray in hand, her direct overseer ushers her back into his office.

“You’ve been sold.” He says, brisk and unsympathetic, handing over a slip of paper without touching her skin. (He’s one of _those._ ) “Your papers and detonator have already been given to your new master, Watto. He didn’t want to wait here until you were finished, so you need to meet him at this location. If you fail to arrive there within the day, you will be hunted down.”

 ----------

Watto owns a brand new shop full of old junk. He knows enough about his wares to understand their market price but is only passible at actually fixing stuff up. Shmi, on the other hand, spent seven years working as a general laborer under Master Takka, who owned a shipyard. On paper this means she ran around doing chores, in actuality she followed fellow slave Tahmtan around as he did spaceship repairs and silently soaked up everything he knew while he urged her to pretend to understand none of it.

Shmi’s undocumented skill with old junk pleases her new master immensely. He is practically radiating smugness. He’d essentially purchased a mechanic for the price of an unskilled laborer right out from under a hutt. He’s too smug, too self absorbed, to be suspicious of the discrepancies in her record, to be suspicious of _her._

Tahmtan had been collared and chipped several times by Master Takka before he was let anywhere near technology, and he was watched constantly. Always reguarded with suspicion. A smart slave, one that knows code and has access to tech, is dangerous. 

Shmi is sly, though. _ash-vareca_ , the one who is crafty, is a favorite of hers. Tahmtan had never taken the stories of the crafty one to heart and regretted it; he made sure she wouldn’t make the same mistake. So, she is skilled but not too skilled, doesn’t understand the applicability of what she knows, and is very grateful for Watto’s generosity regarding her pregnancy. She enjoys working for him, in fact! It’s nice to be able to sit down!

(Watto never notices the discrete scans she takes of her body, looking for a detonator-tracker, or the way she reorganizes the workspace little by little until he needs to ask her where tools reside.)

 ----------

Sandstorms mean very different things to a slave than to a master.

Masters do not know the desert, do not know the snakes in the sand and the dragons in the dunes. Their feet are soft and the sand burns them. They call it: _the dead place._ They fear the desert and her storms because they cannot control them, and because the desert will not help them. _bakha barethri_ lives there and she has no love for slavers.

Shmi, like all desert slaves, was weaned on stories that went like this: a master peruses a slave into the desert, a sandstorm comes and blinds them, the bleeding master staggers back into town, or not. There are two popular endings to this tale, beyond the vicious satisfaction of an injured (maybe dead) and slave-less master: the runaway slave dies or they keep running. Either way, the slave is a slave no more. They are _free_.

So, when Shmi dreams of sandstorms, she is not scared. The sand swells around her and bites at her flesh, but she is a daughter of these deserts and her skin is hard, her steps sure. In her womb, her child burns like a sun. It is not she who rests at the center of the storm, but the baby.

She is still not scared.

\---------- 

When Shmi wakes before dawn, forty weeks and five days pregnant, the Grandmother of the Quarters is at her door. She is old, the oldest _barethri_ alive in these Quarters and she knows stories better than anyone. Her knowledge is ancient, older than anything else alive today, older than the republic. Grandmothers are the reason many slaves carry the wisdom of the desert in their bones. Their words are like water in the desert, necessary for survival.

“I will walk with you, child.” She says.

“Thank you, Grandmother.”

Despite her near-sightless eyes, the Grandmother takes her by the hand and marches her across the sands. For a while they walk in silence, enjoying the cool sands and gentle night. Then, Shmi’s water breaks and the contractions come and the silence is not what she wants.

“Will you tell me a story, Grandmother?” She asks. It is dark and quiet out, but Shmi is sweating.

“Tell me, child, have you ever heard the story of how _bakha barethri_ ’s children learned _eresh_.”

“Yes, but tell it again please, Grandmother.”

“Well, _bakha_ was a _barethri_ a thousand times over but all alone in the sands. All of her children had been taken from her, a thousand children with a thousand different masters. She screamed for them, shouted for them, sent her sorrows and her love across the land in great gusts of sand and wind. But her children could not hear her, could not speak her tongue. For their masters had stripped them of all language until only _anashavan_ was left. In _anashavan_ there were told this: you have no mother, you are unloved, you are alone, you are nothing, you were made for this. And the slaves believed this because they could not understand their mother shouting for them across the dunes. All they knew was _anashavan_ , the deceitful tongue of the masters.

But _bakha barethri_ was not to be deterred. She never stopped shouting the truth: she is their mother, they are loved, they are family, they were _made_ slaves. She keeps shouting and eventually one of her daughters runs to her.

This slave is also a mother and she wants her baby to be born free. She cannot understand the _bakha’s_ call, but she knows it is not _anashavan,_ and for her that is enough. The slave-mother runs day and night, she runs until her water breaks and she falls upon the sands, screaming.

The _bakha_ hears her daughter’s screams and goes to her just in time to deliver the baby from the slave-mother’s womb. There is blood on the sands and the slave-mother is dying, but she sees her child in the _bakha barethri’s_ arms and says, ‘Please, take care of them. Please, tell them everyday that they are loved. Please, tell them the truths of the world. No _anashavan_ for my child, please.’

_bakha_ says, ‘They are already loved, as you are loved. They are already my child, as you are child. Go in peace, daughter.’

Then her daughter dies, but _bakha_ is happy because in death there is freedom and she is holding a son in her arms for the first time in years.

She names him _fraoret_ and speaks to him everyday, saying, ‘You are my child, you are my love. These are the truths of the world-.’

One day, when her son is grown, he asks about the origins of his mother. _bakha barethri_ speaks only truth to her children and so she tells him about slavery.

_fraoret_ is horrified at the idea of his brothers and sisters chained, never knowing the truth, believing only lies. He begins to sneak into Slave Quarters at night and tells his siblings of their mother _bakha barethri_ and her truthful tongue. He teaches them of her love and her sorrow and of her cries across the desert.

Soon, every slave knows _eresh,_ the truthful tongue, and so they know their masters lie and do not believe them. Now they can hear their mother cry for them in the desert and know the truth: they are loved, they are family, they were born to be free.”

“Thank you, Grandmother.” Shmi says, her voice cracking as a contraction rips through her muscles.

“Don’t thank me yet. You’ve still got the hard part yet left.” The Grandmother says, and tugs her across the sands. “Thankfully, I’ve got more stories.”

\----------

Shmi is forty weeks, five days and several hours pregnant. She is also beyond ready to be pregnant no longer.

“Push, Shmi.” Emet urges, but Shmi is already pushing. She feels like a live-wire, like she’s about to go up in flames. The bones of the Grandmother’s hand grind under Shmi’s punishing grip, but the woman doesn’t so much a twitch. Shmi has been in the _baeshaza_ ’s birthing room for hours. It is night now and the pale faces of the triplet moons are peering at her through a tiny window.

“ _Push_.” Emet demands, and Shmi can feel her mother’s hand in her hair, can sense a sandstorm thickening deep in the desert, can feel _aweexcitementhope_ at the back of her head. There is also a hutt enforcer outside the building, ready to chip her son, but she doesn’t focus on him. He has no place in this moment.

Instead she pushes and something gives. Her entire body heaves, her muscles clenching, throat cracking with a scream. The air around her wavers like a desert mirage and Shmi at the nexus of the universe. At the back of her mind something sings; it sounds like freedom tales, like the raspy voice of the sands, like her own humming.

A moment later the cries of a child, _her child_ , fill the air. In the distance, she can hear _bakha barethri_  in the wind, joyous and furious. Her vision is blurry with sweat and fatigue, but out the window the triplet moons seem to smile.

“My child.” Shmi demands, feeling un-whole, incomplete with empty arms. “ _baxsheñti-moi ma puthra_.”

“Shhhh.” Emet comforts, walking into view with a bundle in her arms. Her child. _Her child._ “Here’s your son Shmi.”

Shmi takes her baby from the _baeshaza’_ s arms and looks down onto the face of _her son_ for the first time. A profound effervescent joy swells in her, catching at the back of her throat and burning her eyes. He is a boy and he’s perfect, ten fingers and ten toes, flushed red and wiggling. She thinks she’s never seen anything more beautiful than the child in her arms. She touches his cheek with a shaking finger and it’s soft, soft like what she imagines the petals of flowers might feel like.

“A strong baby.” The Grandmother whispers, and Shmi starts; she’d forgotten the other woman was there. “Are you ready to name him, child.”

Shmi can feel silent tears running down her face. She hasn’t cried in years, it's a waste of water. If she has ever been this happy before, she cannot remember it. “Yes,” she whispers, overcome, “yes I’m ready to Name him.”

The Grandmother nods, craggy face breaking into a grin as she places her hand into the bowl of water at Shmi’s bedside. She stirs it with her fingers and waits.

“I-I name my child Anakin Skywalker. Under the eyes of most, so he will be called. _azem aojaite ma puthra afañt thwashahe_. Under the eyes of _bakha barethri_ , so he will be called. He is _afañt thwashahe_ , son of _saoshyañt thwashahe_. So he is named; so he is loved.”

“We welcome you, Anakin Skywalker, son of Shmi and the Mother Goddess. May you keep your name and know your mothers.” Grandmother says, reaching out and dragging a gnarled finger down her son’s forehead, dampening it with water. “ _berexdhãm_ , _puthra_ of _saoshyañt_ _thwashahe_ and _bakha barethri.”_

**Author's Note:**

> The truthful-tongue I used in this fanfiction is, sadly, not a creation of my imagination. I am hardly a linguist. Basic Spanish thwarts my tongue. So, what I did was take an already existing language and adapt it to my needs. This language is Avestan, which is an extinct Eastern Iranian language used primarily in sacred Zoroastrian texts. I chose this language because I liked it's spiritual connotations, it's semantic focus on truth, and it's separation from indo-european tongues. 
> 
>  
> 
> Acknowledgments: 
> 
> First off, I would like to cite two AO3 authors that had a direct influence on this work: Fialleril and MirandaTam. I'm pretty sure Fialleril created the 'Tatooine Slave Culture' tag, and their work in that sphere is what got me reinvested in Star Wars. MirandTam's 'Jedi Shmi AU' was also a driving force. 'In all your wanderings' Shmi says, "It happens... Masters pursue a slave into the desert. Sand blinds them, and they stumble back into town. Or not.” This direct line inspired my sandstorm scene, so check that out!


End file.
